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Egypt expels Al Jazeera journalists in crackdown on Qatari channel
3 Sep
CAIRO |
(Reuters) – Egypt deported three Al Jazeera journalists on Sunday, days after the Qatari-owned channel carried appeals from leaders of ousted President Mohamed Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood to stage protests against the army-backed government.
The Gulf emirate was a strong financial backer of Brotherhood rule and vehemently opposes the army’s overthrow of Mursi and the ensuing bloody crackdown on his movement.
Al Jazeera’s offices in Cairo have been closed since July 3, when they were raided by security forces hours after Mursi was toppled, although the channel, broadcast from Qatar, can still be seen in Egypt.
Security officials at Cairo airport, declining to be named, said Wayne Hay, Adil Bradlow and Russ Finn had been put on an Egyptian plane headed for London, after being forced to leave their equipment behind.
The men had been held since Tuesday. An Al Jazeera spokesman said they had been released and left Egypt without being given a reason for their detention.
The station also said that Shihab Elddin Shaarawi, an executive producer for Al Jazeera’s Egyptian channel, had been arrested on Friday morning but later released.
The channel’s cameraman Mohamed Badr was detained a month ago and Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Abdullah al-Shami was arrested on August 14.
Both are still in detention, but producer Mohammed Baher was freed on Sunday after being held for five days.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired statements from two Brotherhood leaders who had eluded a wave of arrests, Mohamed El-Beltagi and Essam El-Erian, that included a call to join protests against Egypt’s military-backed interim government. Beltagi has since been caught.
“There has … been a campaign against Al Jazeera in particular, as the channel’s offices were raided last month and security forces seized equipment which has yet to be returned,” Al Jazeera’s English service said on its website.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said Egypt’s government was widening a “censorship campaign”, adding that its research showed that four other journalists were in custody.
“Egyptian security forces continue to detain and harass journalists working for news outlets critical of the military-led government, particularly Al Jazeera and its affiliates,” it said last week.
On Thursday, the government said that Al Jazeera Mubashir Misr, the broadcaster’s Egyptian channel, was operating without a license and that unspecified legal measures would follow, “given the threat it poses to national security”.
Ayman Gaballah, the head of the channel, said the accusations were fabricated.
(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla and by Amena Bakr in Dubai; Writing by Kevin Liffey; Editing by Jon Boyle)
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Comments (3)
mustafaspeaks wrote:
The Egyptian military has that old mindset whereby they can stop the information revolution by expelling a few journalists. At the point when Egyptian “liberals” realize what a devilish pact they have made in overturning democracy and the rule of law, the military will find it difficult to stop future mass demonstrations against its concept of total control. Inshallah.
toTrue4You wrote:
And yet another government overthrown and destabilize thanks to us arms sales and backing. So proud to be an American….
kopasetic wrote:
The Egyptian government is acting on behalf of the people in Egypt who have witnessed what the MB was planning to bring to their country. The actions the Egyptian government is taking are proper and reflect the actions you have to take to stop a plague from spreading.
More senators call for suspension of Egypt aid
18 AugSeveral senators on Sunday joined the growing chorus of lawmakers calling for the United States to suspend aid to Egypt amid the eruption of deadly violence there.
“Now with the recent violent crackdown, I do not see how we can continue aid,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) on NBC’s “Meet The Press.” “I believe it must be suspended.”
Speaking on the same program, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, “I do believe we have to change our aid.”
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” “I think the actions of the last week are no doubt going to cause us to suspend aid.” Corker added that he advocates a “suspension but recalibration” of aid, with an eye on maintaining it in the long term.
The latest comments from the senators represent a shift. Corker last month cautioned against rushing into discussions about cutting off aid. And Reed had said he didn’t think cutting off aid would increase the odds of Egypt implementing a Democratic government.
The U.S. provides $1.6 billion in annual U.S. assistance to Egypt, much of it going toward financing purchases of U.S. military equipment. The Egyptian military’s violent crackdown against defenders of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted president, has led to increasing pressure from members of Congress for the U.S. to suspend its aid to the military.
President Obama last week cancelled a joint training exercise with Egypt’s military planned for next month, a measured response that has left some members of Congress dissatisfied. The Obama administration also is also debating whether to stop next month’s scheduled delivery of new Apache AH-64D aircraft.
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who have been calling for the United States to suspend aid, reiterated their views Sunday.
“We do have influence, but when you don’t use that influence, you do not have that influence,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said on “Fox News Sunday” that future aid to Egypt should be conditional “on specific steps toward the rule of law and return to democracy.”
But other members of Congress cautioned against suspending aid.
“We certainly shouldn’t cut off all aid,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on “Fox News Sunday.”
Speaking on “This Week,” Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “I think we have to be very careful and not ct off our nose to spite our face.”
Tweet a photo of your support to Egyptian rebels
8 JulOr Brazilian or Turkish rebels. Send us a copy and we will post it here!
Egypt needs capitalism
5 JulIt is capitalism, not democracy, that the Arab world needs most
Property rights for aid: this could be the most effective anti-poverty strategy in history
To watch events in Egypt is like seeing a videotape of the Arab Spring being played backwards. The ballot box has been kicked away, the constitution torn up, the military has announced the name of a puppet president – and crowds assemble in Tahrir Square to go wild with joy. The Saudi Arabian monarchy, which was so nervous two years ago, has telegrammed its congratulations to Cairo’s generals. To the delight of autocrats everywhere, Egypt’s brief experiment with democracy seems to have ended in embarrassing failure.
Normally, Western leaders would be lining up to deplore a coup d’etat, but yesterday even William Hague seemed lost for words. As a rule of thumb, he says, Britain prefers civilian rule. But when asked to condemn the Cairo coup, he declined. The Arab world’s Twitter accounts, once full of revolutionary optimism, have turned into a depository of despair. “Egypt has taught me that democracy is a lie and an elected president is a myth,” wrote Ahmed al-Husseini, a Sunni preacher from Bahrain. “No parliament, no elections, no ballot boxes. All lies.”
He has a point. Egypt’s election turned out to be like an Irish EU referendum: voters could give any answer they liked, as long as it was the right one. The army didn’t like how things were going, so it has asked voters to choose again. While the West was celebrating Egypt joining the comity of democratic nations, Egyptians themselves were sliding into an economic abyss, with terrifying shortages of fuel, food and security. Sectarian violence has been thrown into the mix, with persecution of the Coptic Christians followed by Sunni v Shia strife. The murder rate trebled. Things were falling apart, which is why the generals were welcomed back.
But the Arab Spring was a demand for freedom, not necessarily democracy – and the distinction between the two is crucial. Take, for example, the case of Mohammed Bouazizi, who started this chain of events by burning himself alive on a Tunisian street market two years ago. As his family attest, he had no interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell, and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it was to capitalism.
All this has been established by Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who travelled to Egypt to investigate the causes of the Arab Spring. His team of researchers found that Bouazizi had inspired 60 similar cases of self-immolation, including five in Egypt, almost all of which had been overlooked by the press. The narrative of a 1989-style revolution in hope of regime change seemed so compelling to foreigners that there was little appetite for further explanation. But de Soto’s team tracked down those who survived their suicide attempts, and the bereaved families. Time and again, they found the same story: this was a protest for the basic freedom to own and acquire ras el mel, or capital.
Bouazizi killed himself after police confiscated all his fruit and a pair of second-hand electronic scales. This was all he had. He was a gifted trader; he had hoped to save enough money to buy a car and grow his business. On the face of it, losing some fruit and a £100 pair of scales seems like an odd basis for suicide. But having made enemies of the police, Bouazizi realised he would not be allowed to trade again. His family say he felt his life had ended and that, if he died for any cause, it should be that the poor should be able to buy and sell.
For most of the developing world, no such right exists. In theory, everyone is protected by law. But in practice, the process of acquiring a legal licence is so riddled with bribery and bureaucracy that only a small minority can afford to go through with it. To de Soto, this explains much of world poverty. Step out of the door of the Nile Hilton, he says, and you are not leaving behind the world of internet, ice machines and antibiotics. The poor have access to all of these things if they really want it. What you are leaving behind is the world of legally enforceable transactions of property rights. These traders do not really break the law – the law breaks them.
Take Fadoua Laroui, a Moroccan mother, whose suicide was filmed. She explained her reasons before setting herself alight. “I am going to immolate myself,” she said. “I am doing this to protest against hogra and economic exclusion.” Hogra means contempt towards small traders, the contempt which Bouazizi was shown by the police. A similar story was told by the survivors, and the relatives of the deceased. As Bouazizi’s brother explained to de Soto: “People like Mohammed are concerned with doing business. They don’t understand anything about politics.”
Technically, the law covers everyone. But under Hosni Mubarak, for example, opening a small bakery in Cairo took more than 500 days of bureaucracy. To open a business in Egypt means dealing with 29 government agencies. The same story is true throughout the region: the average Arab needs to present four dozen documents and endure two years of red tape to become the legal owner of land or business. If you don’t have the time or money for this, you are condemned to life in the black market: no matter how good you are, you will never trade your way out of poverty. Arabs are so angry about this that they are burning themselves alive.
William Hague said yesterday that Egyptians want the freedom to express their views and choose their governments. Stability, he said, “comes from democratic institutions”. Yet there has been depressingly little evidence of this stability in democratic Egypt – as the Saudis are gleefully pointing out. This sets a terrible example to other fledgling democracies: that if things get tough, the army can eject the government and start again. Whoever follows Mohammed Morsi as president will know that, in effect, he serves at the pleasure of the military.
A few weeks ago, de Soto told the US Congress that the West has fundamentally misread the Arab Spring and is missing a massive opportunity. Bouazizi, and the five Egyptians who self-immolated, spoke for 380 million Arabs who lack property rights or any legal protection. This applies to Britain: if we were to become champions of these people, and demand the extension of property rights in return for our foreign aid, it could be the most effective anti-poverty strategy ever devised. And it might make us millions of new friends in the Arab world.
This is not a new idea, but the revival of an old one. As Margaret Thatcher once put it, “being democratic is not enough – a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right”. Freedom, she said, depends on the strength of the institutions: law and order, a free press, the police and an army that serves the government rather than supervises it. History is proving her right – in Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Egypt. The façade of democracy can be horribly deceptive; it is the strength of institutions that decides if nations rise or fall.
Fraser Nelson is editor of ‘The Spectator’
What do Stalinist aristocrats in England think about rebelling colonists, you ask?
5 JulEgypt, Brazil, Turkey: without politics, protest is at the mercy of the elites
From Egypt to Brazil, street action is driving change, but organisation is essential if it’s not to be hijacked or disarmed
Two years after the Arab uprisings fuelled a wave of protests and occupations across the world, mass demonstrations have returned to their crucible in Egypt. Just as millions braved brutal repression in 2011 to topple the western-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak, millions have now taken to the streets of Egyptian cities to demand the ousting of the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.
As in 2011, the opposition is a middle-class-dominated alliance of left and right. But this time the Islamists are on the other side while supporters of the Mubarak regime are in the thick of it. The police, who beat and killed protesters two years ago, this week stood aside as demonstrators torched Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood offices. And the army, which backed the dictatorship until the last moment before forming a junta in 2011, has now thrown its weight behind the opposition.
Whether its ultimatum to the president turns into a full-blown coup or a managed change of government, the army – lavishly funded and trained by the US government and in control of extensive commercial interests – is back in the saddle. And many self-proclaimed revolutionaries who previously denounced Morsi for kowtowing to the military are now cheering it on. On past experience, they’ll come to regret it.
The protesters have no shortage of grievances against Morsi’s year-old government, of course: from the dire state of the economy, constitutional Islamisation and institutional power grabs to its failure to break with Mubarak’s neoliberal policies and appeasement of US and Israeli power.
But the reality is, however incompetent Morsi’s administration, many key levers of power – from the judiciary and police to the military and media – are effectively still in the hands of the old regime elites. They openly regard the Muslim Brotherhood as illegitimate interlopers, whose leaders should be returned to prison as soon as possible.
Yet these are the people now in alliance with opposition forces who genuinely want to see Egypt’s revolution brought at least to a democratic conclusion. If Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are forced from office, it’s hard to see such people breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy or asserting national independence, as most Egyptians want. Instead, the likelihood is that the Islamists, also with mass support, will resist being denied their democratic mandate, plunging Egypt into deeper conflict.
Egypt’s latest eruption has immediately followed mass protests in Turkey and Brazil (as well as smaller upheavals in Bulgaria and Indonesia). None has mirrored the all-out struggle for power in Egypt, even if some demonstrators in Turkey called for the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to go. But there are significant echoes that highlight both the power and weakness of such flash demonstrations of popular anger.
In the case of Turkey, what began as a protest against the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Gezi Park mushroomed into mass demonstrations against Erdoğan, ‘s increasingly assertive Islamist administration, bringing together Turkish and Kurdish nationalists, liberals and leftists, socialists and free-marketeers. The breadth was a strength, but the disparate nature of the protesters’ demands is likely to weaken its political impact.
In Brazil, mass demonstrations against bus and train fare increases turned into wider protests about poor public services and the exorbitant cost of next year’s World Cup. As in Turkey and Egypt, middle-class and politically footloose youth were at the forefront, and political parties were discouraged from taking part, while rightwing groups and media tried tosteer the agenda from inequality to tax cuts and corruption.
Brazil’s centre-left government has lifted millions out of poverty, and the protests have been driven by rising expectations. But unlike elsewhere in Latin America, the Lula government never broke with neoliberal orthodoxy or attacked the interests of the rich elite. His successor, Dilma Rousseff – who responded to the protests by pledging huge investments in transport, health and education and a referendum on political reform – now has the chance to change that.
Despite their differences, all three movements have striking common features. They combine widely divergent political groups and contradictory demands, along with the depoliticised, and lack a coherent organisational base. That can be an advantage for single-issue campaigns, but can lead to short-lived shallowness if the aims are more ambitious – which has arguably been the fate of the Occupy movement.
All of them have, of course, been heavily influenced and shaped by social media and the spontaneous networks they foster. But there are plenty of historical precedents for such people power protests – and important lessons about why they are often derailed or lead to very different outcomes from those their protagonists hoped for.
The most obvious are the European revolutions of 1848, which were also led by middle-class reformers and offered the promise of a democratic spring, but had as good as collapsed within a year. The tumultuous Paris upheaval of May 1968 was followed by the electoral victory of the French right. Those who marched for democratic socialism in east Berlin in 1989 ended up with mass privatisation and unemployment. The western-sponsored colour revolutions of the last decade used protesters as a stage army for the transfer of power to favoured oligarchs and elites. The indignados movement against austerity in Spain was powerless to prevent the return of the right and a plunge into even deeper austerity.
In the era of neoliberalism, when the ruling elite has hollowed out democracy and ensured that whoever you vote for you get the same, politically inchoate protest movements are bound to flourish. They have crucial strengths: they can change moods, ditch policies and topple governments. But without socially rooted organisation and clear political agendas, they can flare and fizzle, or be vulnerable to hijacking or diversion by more entrenched and powerful forces.
That also goes for revolutions – and is what appears to be happening in Egypt. Many activists regard traditional political parties and movements as redundant in the internet age. But that’s an argument for new forms of political and social organisation. Without it, the elites will keep control – however spectacular the protests.
• Twitter: @SeumasMilne